During his stop in Nevada - the state with the nation's highest unemployment rate - Giuliani accused Obama of being anti-business and creating thousands of pages of regulations aimed at turning the country into a socialist government. "Anybody in Las Vegas who is going to vote for him is out of their mind, now that's probably true in the rest of the country, too," Giuliani said. "He's going to make France look like a low-tax country." Giuliani also admonished Chief Justice John Roberts for making a terrible mistake by breaking with the Supreme Court's other conservative justices and upholding Obama's health care law. "He's now given Congress the unlimited power to tax us," Giuliani said.

Four-year-old Christopher Rowe was killed in August 2011 as he walked with his mom and two sisters on the way to soccer practice. He lagged a bit behind the others and was struck in the marked crosswalk and flew 80 feet when hit by Latino illegal alien Marcos Lopez Garcia. The Hispanic illegal immigrant then sped off and switched cars to evade authorities, but was seen by a concerned citizen who contacted police. Otherwise the killer might have successfully reached Mexico, as he was planning, and thereby escape justice entirely. Garcia was arrested later on the day of the crash. Garcia had been arrested twice before for unlicensed driving but has been released rather than deported. He was only sentenced to four years in prison for the felony hit-and-run death of the 4-year-old boy. He was also sentenced by Judge Kenneth Gnoss to one year for misdemeanor vehicular manslaughter without gross negligence and six months for misdemeanor driving without a license, but will serve those sentences concurrent to the four-year term. How many more American children is this illegal alien scumbag going to kill before our legal system treats him like the threat to public safety that he is?

The same Jewish organizations that praise Obama on his support of illegal immigrants turn a blind eye when Israel starts deporting black Africans. Apparently, these Jews feel that it is right for Israelis to protect their nation, but wrong for Americans to do the same.

Romney must make sure that whites - particularly young whites - realize that Obama is their enemy and must be voted out of office in November 2012. Fortunately, one of Romney’s biggest advantages over Obama is that religious whites favor him by better than 2-to-1.

It’s been days since Charlie Rangel’s primary. And it’s still not entirely clear who won. The veteran Democratic black congressman might be the winner in New York’s 13th District, but no one really knows.
It’s a bizarre situation that just keeps getting weirder, a strange case of missing precincts, questionable ballots and utter confusion over who’s to blame for the mess and when the race might be settled. What’s known is this: 32 precincts – 6% of all votes cast – had yet to be accounted for. And another 2,447 affidavit ballots and 667 absentee votes hadn’t been counted yet either. According to the city Board of Elections, Rangel’s lead over second-place finisher state Sen. Adriano Espaillat stood at 1,032 votes, with enough outstanding ballots to alter the outcome. Naturally, the courts are now involved. The state Supreme Court agreed to hear a lawsuit brought by the Espaillat campaign, asking it to examine the squirrelly vote-counting process. Before things went off the rails, Tuesday night had been an evening of celebration and vindication for Rangel, who seemed to have survived the most serious reelection threat of his 42-year career in the House. After initial tallies showed the congressional titan jumping to a 20-point lead over Espaillat, Rangel took to the stage at Sylvia’s, the famed soul food institution located on Harlem’s Lenox Avenue, to declare victory and then party late into the evening with boisterous supporters. But as Tuesday turned to Wednesday and more votes trickled in, something strange happened: Rangel’s margin of victory began to shrink, first to five points and then, by midday Wednesday, to two points. After delivering a concession statement the previous night, Espaillat released a new statement that suggested the race wasn’t yet settled. “Our message of bringing bold, new ideas to change Congress connected with voters, as demonstrated by our strong show of support and the voting results that continue to come in,” he said. Not much has changed since then. And the race might remain in limbo for days, if not weeks. Valerie Vazquez, a spokeswoman for the New York City Board of Elections, said that with the July 4th holiday approaching, officials wouldn’t begin processing the affidavit and absentee ballots until after the holiday. And should the margin between the two candidates diminish to one-half of one percent or less of all votes cast, she said, the elections board would undertake a manual review of all ballots cast. The spectacle — and the surrounding chaos — has the city’s political class staring in disbelief. While election workers continued the tedious task of reviewing ballots, there were indications that tensions between the Rangel and Espaillat camps were beginning to escalate. Ethnic and racial tensions also are bubbling to the surface. Espaillat’s backers contend that many Hispanic voters had been turned away from the polls as they tried to cast ballots for the state senator, who is trying to become the first Dominican-American member of Congress. Leonel Fernandez, the president of the Dominican Republic, has reached out to Espaillat to see if he can offer any assistance, according to an Espaillat aide.
A group of liberal activists has been scheduled to march in front of the Federal Election Commission in downtown Washington, protesting what they saw as a concerted effort to disenfranchise Hispanic voters in the race and to call on the office “to investigate claims of voter fraud and intervene in this disputed primary.”

African-American Donald Ray Dokins has appeared in court and a judge has set his bail at $3 million. He did not enter a plea and his arraignment has been postponed until July 16, 2012. Dokins rode up on a bicycle on June 4, 2012 and opened fire on a crowd standing outside a South Los Angeles home. Angel Cortez Nava was fatally shot in the stomach as his father cradled him. The father, 24-year-old Mauro Cortez, was hit in the shoulder. The black gang member appeared in court and was charged with first-degree murder and attempted murder as an adult, despite his age. A member of the Fudgetown Mafia Crip gang, Dokins was identified as a suspect within days of Angel's death and is believed by police to be a suspect in previous murders. Detectives with the Los Angeles Police Department have accused Dokins of being a member of a clique within the Fudgetown gang called T.Funk Ridaz. Angel was being held by his father Mauro Cortez at the side of a car when the black shooter, riding on a bike fired several shots into the crowd around the vehicle. One bullet hit the child in the stomach and as he died was cradled in his father's arms, despite the fact that he had been shot in the left shoulder. The police believe that because Cortez had been wearing a purple shirt, which is the color of the Fudgetown gangs rivals the Barrio Grape Street gang, he was shot.

The lawyer for Manuel De Jesus Rosales, accused of slitting the throat of his baby grandson and attempting to stab his daughter to death, plans to file a motion to bar the use of the death penalty. The attorney claimed that it would be too dangerous to travel to his client’s native Honduras to gather information about his past. Assistant public defender Neil McLoughlin told Judge Margaret Steinbeck that his life would be put at risk if he went to the Honduran coast notorious for narcotics trafficking where Rosales lived for the first 25 years of his life. Rosales, who now lives in Lehigh Acres, Florida was charged with murder in the 2010 slaying. He slit three-month-old Josue Rosales’ throat in front of the infant’s mother, Karminda Rosales Salazar, Rosales’ daughter. As she lay bleeding in the driveway of their home, suffering stab wounds to her neck, Rosales said to her: ‘here’s your b******. He is known in his neighborhood for being an abusive heavy drinker. The state is seeking the death penalty against Rosales and the trial has been set for September 2012.

Israel has been alarmed by an influx of migrants from Africa through its border with Egypt, and has begun weekly airlifts to deport a few hundred South Sudanese. The ministry said that there were around 2,000 Ivorians in the country illegally, out of a total of some 60,000 African migrants who Israel says are mostly job seekers and threaten to upset the nation’s demographics. It is legally questionable whether the majority of African migrants in Israel, about 50,000 people from war-torn Eritrea and Sudan, could be deported. There have been numerous reports of violent acts perpetrated against African migrants, as well as a spate of incidents against persons of color mistaken as migrants by their Israeli assailants. Demonstration turned violent when scores among the protesters attacked African passersby and looted their stores.

Friday, June 29, 2012

Apparently he is the descendant of African slaves, even though he looks white. His genetic lineage - which he inherited from his mother - appears in Africa, in Senegal, but has never been seen in north-west Europe. It is likely to have reached Britain through the arrival of slaves in Liverpool. On his father's side, his ancestry appears to be Scandinavian and he carries a genetic marker which is found in a quarter of Norwegian men. Research suggests that 32% of British men are descended from the Pretani - the original Britons - while more than 12% have Germanic ancestry, 11% are hunter gatherers and more than 7% are Ancient Irish.

The video shows masked members of the Gulf cartel standing behind five shirtless members of the Zetas cartel, who have black 'Zs' painted on their chests. The masked men are wielding machetes and slap their prisoners, who are kneeling below them, as they each state their name for the camera. When they are asked who sent them, they each reply "Z-40". 40 is the name given to Miguel Angel Treviño Morales, the Zeta cartel's second-in-command. The camera then shows three of the men start the grizzly, slow process of beheading them as they hack and saw at their necks with the machetes. When the process is over, after almost two painstaking minutes, the masked men hold the severed heads up like they are trophies. The video was shot in Río Bravo, Mexico, along the U.S. border. The Zetas were founded by former soldiers who defected from the Mexican military in 1998 to work as hired killers for drug traffickers. They have since carved out their own smuggling empire, expanded massively across Mexico and diversified into kidnapping, extortion and theft of crude oil.

But the region has seen a jump during that time in the number of highly segregated black and Latino schools. Half of all African American students in the region still go to school in what sociologists would consider “extreme segregation, " in schools where 90% or more of students are African American. Twenty-two percent of all Latino public school students in the eight-county region go to highly segregated schools, a proportion that is growing in the city and the suburbs. The number of Chicago public schools that are 90% or more black has increased in the last 20 years, from 276 to 287. That’s despite a 57,000-student drop in black enrollment in the district. And 71.0% of all CPS black students go to extremely racially isolated schools or more black. In 20 years, that figure has inched down only negligibly, from 73.4%. The number of racially isolated Hispanic schools is up, from 26 to 84. Thirty-nine percent of all CPS Hispanic students go to extremely racially isolated schools. This is up from 20 years ago, when 17% of Hispanics went to such schools. White students have become more concentrated. There are now seven schools that are at least 70% white; 20 years ago there were none. The number of “integrated” schools - schools where no one race makes up more than 50% of the student body - has taken a nosedive, from 106 schools in 1990 to 66 schools today. “No majority” schools used to make up 17.5% of all city schools. Today the proportion is just 9.8%. There has been a dramatic decrease in the number of extremely white schools. In 1990, a third of schools in the metro area were 90% or more white. Today, just 4% are. The number of overwhelmingly white schools dropped from 562 to 103. At the same time, the number of schools where no one race holds a majority has grown across the suburbs. The number of such schools more than quadrupled - from 58 to 280. Racially isolated black and Latino schools are popping up in the suburbs: 10% of all suburban Latino kids and 20% of all suburban black kids attend them, up from 20 years ago. Today, 80% of all white kids living in the suburbs still attend schools that are at least 50% white. That number is down from 90% twenty years ago.

The achievement gap between white and black students widened in reading, math, science and writing on the MME, and narrowed in only social studies. The gap between white and Hispanic students widened in math and science, but narrowed in other subjects. The gap also widened for both groups in the percentage of students considered college-ready. Results in predominantly black Detroit Public Schools were grim. Just 205 students - or 6% of the 3,418 who took the math exam - passed. In science, 104 students - or 3% of the 3,477 students who took the exam, passed. Only 1.8% DPS students were deemed college ready. Sixteen Detroit Public Schools had no college-ready students.

Overall, 50% of those polled said that they disapprove of the court’s 5–4 decision, while 45% said that they support it. Consistently, a majority of voters said that they oppose the individual mandate (53%); believe taxes will increase (52%); believe that their personal health-care costs will increase (56%); and disapprove of Obama’s handling of health care in general (58%). Only 24% of those polled said that they believe the ruling will make the country better off. Fifty-nine percent of poll respondents said they believe the country is headed in the wrong direction.

Groups that are currently eligible for U.S. Minority Business Development Agency (MBDA) services included Hasidic Jews, Asian Pacific Americans and Asian Indians. If the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee's (ADC) petition passes through, more grants and funding will be funneled to the Arab American business community. There will also be more contracts for the community that can be applied on the federal, local and state levels, Fay Beydoun, Executive Director of Arab American Chamber of Commerce, said. ADC’s petition is full of details and descriptions on how the Arab community is as a distinct one whether in their skin color, food habits and music, and how the group has had faced discrimination ever since their migration to the United States in the 19th century. If the Arabs are successful in their goal then we will probably see U.S. taxpayer money being funneled to Islamic terrorist groups.

During the sentencing hearing in Columbia County Court, Shafiqul Islam, 22, of Hudson, New York, told the family of the murder victim that if they could not forgive him he hoped that God would. In May 2012, Islam pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and other charges for the strangulation killing of Lois Decker in her home in Hillsdale, which is located over the state line from Egremont. Several members of Decker’s family told the court about their shock and anger over the pointless and brutal murder of a much loved sister, mother and grandmother. Decker’s family also lashed out at Islam. "There is a black mark on his soul that will follow him through this life and beyond," said Decker’s daughter, Dr. Diane Demarest. "I have to believe Mr. Islam will suffer for his crime." Islam’s attorney, Michael Howard, read a statement by his client in which Islam admitted his guilt for the crime and apologized to the family. Judge Jonathan Nichols sentenced Islam to a minimum of 20 years and a maximum of life in state prison for the heinous crime. Islam was also sentenced to concurrent two- to four-year sentences on three counts of fourth-degree possession of stolen property. He additionally agreed to pay about $20,000 in restitution to Decker’s family. "I hope the parole board never releases you [from prison] and that you spend the rest of your life incarcerated," the judge told Islam. The judge, in an unusual move, had murder scene photographs included in the presentence report that will be given to the New York State Department of Corrections. "They will follow him for the rest of his life," he said of the photographs. No motive was ever determined in the killing. Six weeks before Decker’s murder, Islam - a convicted sex offender who was born in Bangladesh but grew up in New York - was released from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody, a move that was blasted by both Judge Nichols and Columbia County District Attorney Paul Czajka. Nichols said that Islam’s release was inexplicable and hoped immigration officials looked at this case and took it upon themselves to change the regulations. Islam is a Level 2 sex offender who served a two-year state prison sentence after he was convicted in 2008 of promoting a sexual performance of a child, a felony. He had taken lewd photographs of a 12-year-old girl. Ordered removed from the United States by a federal judge, Islam remained in custody with ICE after his release from prison, but was let go in October 2011. An ICE spokesman who spoke to The Eagle blamed Islam’s home country and a 2001 Supreme Court ruling that only allows people under removal orders to be held in ICE custody for up to 180 days. Bangladeshi officials dragged their feet about getting travel documents for Islam. But Czajka said this excuse didn’t hold water since ICE can take other factors, including risk of flight and danger to the community, into account when determining whether to hold a detainee longer than 180 days. The DA said he believed that a child abuser fit that description and that ICE screwed up big time.

African-American Brian Corder, 26, from Northridge, California, is accused of conspiring to kill his wife who was four months pregnant when she was savagely beaten. Corder planned the attack with fellow African-Americans Stephon Crutchfield, 21, and girlfriend Fredericka Carmouche. They used frying pans and lamps to make it look like a break in. Corder, Carmouche and Crutchfield have all been charged with conspiracy and attempted murder. They are being held on $1 million bond.

For years, Avrohom Mondrowitz counseled children out of his home in the Borough Park neighborhood of Brooklyn. He was host of a call-in radio show popular among ultra-Orthodox Jewish listeners, claiming to be a rabbi and psychologist. But law enforcement officials say Mondrowitz, who fled to Israel in 1984 to avoid arrest, was also something else: a compulsive pedophile. The Brooklyn district attorney, Charles J. Hynes, has repeatedly said that since taking office in 1990, he has vigorously tried to extradite Mondrowitz. Hynes has said that his office was instrumental in bringing about a change in a treaty between the United States and Israel in 2007 that had thwarted earlier extradition efforts. But newly disclosed documents from Hynes’s office cast doubts on his accounts of his role in the case, suggesting that for many years, the office paid little attention to it. Michael Lesher, a writer and lawyer who represents several of Mondrowitz’s accusers, obtained 103 pages of files on the case from the district attorney’s office after a protracted court battle to secure them under the state’s Freedom of Information Law. “There isn’t a single e-mail, a single letter, a single memo, either originating from the D.A.’s office or addressed to it, that so much as mentions any attempt by the D.A. to seek a change in the extradition treaty,” Lesher said. “It’s just inconceivable that such important negotiation on such a detailed issue could have taken place and not left a trace in the documentary record.” Hynes has long been criticized by advocacy groups representing victims of child sexual abuse, who claimed that he was too accommodating of politically influential rabbis in the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community, many of whom teach that such crimes should be handled by rabbinical authorities. Scrutiny of his office intensified recently after articles in The New York Times raised questions about his handling of sexual abuse cases among the ultra-Orthodox. Hynes has defended his record, but after the articles were published, he promised to push for legislation making it mandatory for rabbis to report abuse. He also set up a task force to crack down on witness intimidation, which has stymied many sexual abuse cases in the community. The Mondrowitz case has long been one of the most notorious child sexual abuse cases in Brooklyn. Mondrowitz was charged with molesting five boys, but Amy Neustein, editor of the book “Tempest in the Temple: Jewish Communities and Child Sex Scandals,” which includes a history of the case, said that she believed he had at least 100 victims. Mondrowitz, now 64, has denied the charges. The first efforts to extradite Mondrowitz, made in the mid-1980s by Hynes’s predecessor as district attorney, Elizabeth Holtzman, failed after the Israeli authorities ruled that the extradition treaty did not cover sodomy. After the treaty was amended in 2007, an Israeli court ordered Mondrowitz to be returned to Brooklyn, but the Israel Supreme Court reversed the decision in 2010. In its ruling, the court said that the long delay in amending the treaty had created a “substantive violation” to Mondrowitz’s right to a fair trial, according to a United States Justice Department summary of the decision. The court noted that the treaty could have been changed much earlier. Over the years, Hynes has often said in interviews that he had placed a priority on pursuing Mr. Mondrowitz. In 2009, he said on the syndicated radio show “Talkline with Zev Brenner” that his office, led by Rhonnie Jaus, the chief of his sex crimes bureau, “convinced the State Department to bring the case to the Israeli government to change the extradition treaty.” Hynes reiterated his stance in an e-mail recently. A spokeswoman for the State Department said that information to confirm Hynes’s assertions was not readily available and would have to be researched. Federal officials, not local ones, negotiate extradition treaties, but the new documents obtained by Lesher provide no evidence that Jaus or anyone in the office tried to lobby American or Israeli authorities to change the extradition rules. In a recent interview, Jaus said that the documents released to Lesher did not show the full scope of the office’s efforts, noting that more than 280 pages in the file were withheld. The office said in a letter to Lesher that the pages that were withheld consisted mainly of internal agency documents, like memos between staff members. Jaus, who has been chief of sex crimes since 1992, said that she did not get involved in the case until 2000, when the State Department alerted her that Mondrowitz was trying to return to the United States. Hopes of arresting him ended when he failed to arrive, she said. Asked what she did to lobby for treaty changes, she said that her office made occasional calls to the Justice Department, mainly to check on the status of negotiations over the treaty. The first call was in 2000 to review the history of the case, she said, followed by another in 2003 and two calls in 2006. “If you can’t extradite him because of an existing treaty, what can you do?” she said. “But our position was very well known: We always wanted to extradite this person.”

Saudi national Khalid Aldawsari came to the United States as a student to study chemical engineering at Texas Tech, but his interests turned to jihad instead of science. In the months before his arrest, Khalid Ali-M Aldawsari collected bomb-making supplies and instructional videos and made a list of targets, from nuclear power plants to the home of a former president. Aldawsari has been convicted of attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction. He faces up to life in prison.

In both Ohio and Pennsylvania, more than twice as many respondents say that the decision makes them less likely to support Obama (27% in both) as say it makes them more likely to back him (12% in Pennsylvania, 11% in Ohio). Voters who care about the illegal immigration issue the most tend to disagree with Obama’s policy. The numbers harken back to polling conducted after Obama’s decision to publicly support gay marriage. A Gallup poll back then showed that a slim majority of Americans backed the move, but when it came to affecting their vote, 26% said that it made them less likely to vote for Obama, while just 13% said it made them more likely to vote for him.

The black suspect, Shawn Brock, is being held without bail at the Clark County Detention Center on counts of burglary, robbery, sexual assault with a deadly weapon, first-degree kidnapping with a deadly weapon and robbery with a deadly weapon, according to arrest reports. The burglary and robbery counts stem from an unrelated purse-snatching incident that happened several hours after the sexual assault. Police said that the sexual assault occurred shortly after midnight on June 18, 2012 when Brock followed a 19-year-old woman leaving Mini Mart, 3455 N. Nellis Blvd. The victim told detectives she rebuffed the black man’s advances when she was shopping at the convenience store. As she walked to her nearby apartment complex, the woman noticed the black man following her in a sport-utility vehicle. The African-American suspect then cornered her inside the complex and pointed a handgun at her while demanding money. When the victim said that she didn’t have any money, he ordered her behind a Dumpster, where he sexually assaulted her. After the attack, the woman flagged down a nearby officer and reported the sexual assault. Detectives used surveillance images from Mini Mart to identify the black suspect as Brock. In the process, detectives learned that Brock had been arrested several hours after the sexual assault. Police arrested him after he stole a woman’s purse from her car at a downtown parking garage. When detectives interviewed Brock in jail, he denied the sexual assault — instead saying he paid the victim $40 for sex. Detectives, however, located a handgun at the apartment where Brock was arrested for the purse-snatching. The handgun matched the description of the weapon described by the victim in the sexual assault.

Detectives say that 42-year-old Latina Vera Castillo did a drive-by shootiing with her 2-year-old and 9-month old in the back seat of her car. "It's nothing new. Happens all of the time out here in Rose Park," said one area resident. Those who live in the area may be used to the gunfire, but police combed the streets looking for Castillo after she called another daughter to say that she was going to harm her children. Castillo later turned herself in, bringing an end to a violent outburst. She is in a Salt Lake City jail cell, charged with attempted murder while her children are safe and in the state's custody.

But the judge also tacked on an unusual form of punishment for Eliyahu Werdesheim: homework. Werdesheim, 24, must read, research and write about Baltimore City's special interest groups and the strengths and weaknesses of its neighborhoods. White advised Werdesheim that he could find the publications he needed for his research at the Enoch Pratt Free Library, where she hangs out. White sentenced Werdesheim to three years in prison — all suspended — on each of two charges: second-degree assault and false imprisonment of then-15-year-old Corey Ausby of Baltimore. She also sentenced him to three years of supervised probation, with conditions. In addition to probation, Werdesheim is to pay court costs, and must work and attend school regularly. Werdesheim is to have no contact with Ausby. White gave Werdesheim and his attorney, Andrew Alperstein, no more than 18 months to move to strike a conviction that stemmed from an altercation on November 19, 2010. At the time, Werdesheim was a relatively new member of the Shomrim of Baltimore neighborhood watch group. He was on patrol with his brother, Avi, when he twice confronted Corey Ausby, whom Werdesheim said was looking into houses and car windows in the Upper Park Heights area of Baltimore near Pikesville. White convicted Werdesheim on May 3, 2012 of second-degree assault and false imprisonment of Ausby. He was acquitted on charges of using a dangerous weapon with intent to injure. His brother was found not guilty.

The case began in 2011, when the Brooklyn district attorney, Charles J. Hynes, presided over a crowded news conference at his office to announce the indictment of the black men on charges including rape, sex trafficking and compelling prostitution. The black men had used intimidation and threats to keep the young woman, a member of the neighborhood’s Chabad Lubavitch community, silent as they raped her and forced her to have sex with others, prosecutors said. But the accused, four older black men, denied the woman’s charges, and one man said that he had a consensual sexual relationship with her. The case began to unravel amid questions over the accuser’s credibility and whether prosecutors had mishandled potentially exculpatory evidence in the case. Recently, prosecutors stood inside a courtroom at State Supreme Court, a few hundred feet from the district attorney’s office, and asked for the indictment to be dismissed. “After a careful reinvestigation of this matter it is clear to the district attorney’s office that we cannot go forward,” Michael Vecchione, the head of the Brooklyn district attorney’s rackets bureau, told a State Supreme Court judge. “Therefore, in the interest of justice we move to dismiss the entire case against all defendants.” Two of the four black defendants, Damien Crooks and Darrell Dula, attended the proceeding with friends and relatives and then left the courthouse. Although the charges against the two other blacks, Jamali and Jawara Brockett, were also dismissed, they remained in custody on unrelated charges. In a hallway outside the courtroom, Crooks and Dula said that they were relieved that the charges against them had been dismissed and that they were looking forward to getting on with their lives. Down the block, in front of the district attorney’s office, a group of about 15 people that included advocates for sex-trafficking victims objected to the dismissals. One man read aloud a letter that he said was from the father of the accuser in the case, who told prosecutors that the sexual abuse began when she was 13. “Presented in context and explained by experts in sex trafficking and domestic violence, the evidence should have been more than sufficient to convict my daughter’s traffickers,” the letter said. Hynes said that he sympathized with the frustration expressed by the woman’s father. He told reporters that he would have gone forward with the prosecution if it had been possible, but that information that had turned up during a reinvestigation of the case precluded it. He declined to divulge the information, saying that the investigation had been confidential. In April 2012, prosecutors said that they had neglected to turn over certain police reports to defense lawyers; the reports indicated that the accuser had recanted some of her accusations. Soon, prosecutors turned over other withheld material, including medical reports that indicated that the accuser had a history of mental illness and amnesia. Recently, defense lawyers filed motions requesting that the charges be dismissed and asking that prosecutors explain why the evidence had not been turned over earlier.

African-American Daniel Collins, 72, had been involved in an ongoing dispute with the unidentified neighbor for some time, Det. Lt. Andrew McGurr said. The neighbor told officers that Collins pointed a revolver at him in the vestibule of their apartment building. Collins said that he confronted the man after hearing him pass gas in front of his apartment door, but denied threatening him with a gun. He consented to a search, and officers recovered a .32 caliber revolver from his vehicle. He was arrested and charged with aggravated assault, possession of a weapon for an unlawful purpose, unlawful possession of a firearm and making terroristic threats.

Hsiu-Ying "Lisa" Tseng, who ran a medical clinic in Rowland Heights, failed to heed warnings that something was terribly wrong and young men were repeatedly overdosing or dying, Judge M.L. Villar de Longoria said. Tseng, 42, is charged with second-degree murder in the 2009 deaths of three men, all in their 20s. She is also charged with 20 felony counts of prescribing drugs to people with no legitimate need for the medications and one count of prescribing drugs using fraud. It is the first time the Los Angeles County district attorney's office has filed murder charges against a doctor because of reckless prescribing practices, officials said. Tseng has been linked to the overdose deaths of at least eight patients, including the three murder victims: Joseph Rovero III, 21, an Arizona State University student from San Ramon, east of Oakland; Vu Nguyen, 28, of Lake Forest; and Steven Ogle, 24, of Palm Desert. During a three-week preliminary hearing, dozens of prosecution witnesses described Tseng's clinic as overflowing with patients who seemed to be strung out on drugs. One former patient testified that he overdosed while in her office restroom. Others said that they learned from fellow addicts that it was easy to get prescriptions for powerful drugs from Tseng. Prosecutors showed the judge a video of Tseng prescribing pain and anti-anxiety medications to an undercover Drug Enforcement Administration agent even though she did not believe he had an injury. "Your wrist looks perfectly OK," Tseng said in the video. "I mean, I don't see a scar even.... If you need a little bit of pain medication here and there, fine, but for this kind of pain, you don't even need Vicodin.... This is ridiculous." Minutes later, however, she wrote the agent a prescription for Vicodin and Xanax, an anti-anxiety drug. In her ruling, Villar de Longoria said that Tseng failed to heed repeated red flags that her patients were abusing drugs and dying. She noted prosecution evidence that Tseng had been notified by coroner's investigators and law enforcement officials that her young, vibrant patients were dying of overdoses. Additionally, there was testimony that some of her patients' family members called Tseng, begging her to stop prescribing to their loved ones. David Huy of Laguna Hills called Tseng after finding pill bottles in his son's bedroom. "I told her that she should have her license taken away, that she was a drug pusher," Huy testified. After the judge's ruling, family members of some of Tseng's former patients who overdosed wept and embraced. "I'm someone who believes in God, so I forgive her," said a tearful Joseph Rovero II, the father of one of Tseng's deceased patients. "But as for the laws of man, I feel Dr. Tseng has violated them. She committed a crime, and she has to answer for it." Tseng, who has surrendered her medical license, was arrested March 1, 2012 and continues to be held in lieu of $3 million bail. The judge denied her attorneys' request to lower that amount.

The woman was assaulted while walking by herself, police said. The victim was pulled behind some mechanical boxes away from the street in a more secluded area, Deputy District Attorney Carolyn Powell, who is prosecuting this case, said. People who were walking by caught sight of the assault and called the police, Powell added. The black suspect, Leonard Charles Easton, 52, is a previously convicted sexual offender temporarily residing in the Santa Clara-San Jose area, according to police. "Right now he could get 190 years to life in prison if he is convicted on all three charges and prior allegations," Powell said. "It is a horrific crime that the victim was subjected to and we are going to prosecute it to the furthest extent of the law." Easton was identified by the Santa Clara County District Attorney's Crime Lab's scientific testing of semen found on the victim, according to Powell. He has been arrested and arraigned at Santa Clara County Superior Court. Easton is being charged with forced penetration with a foreign object, forced oral copulation, robbery and other charges related to his prior convictions, according to Powell. He also has two prior strikes for oral copulation and rape for which he served time in jail.

The same circuits in the brain that allow us to see which ethnic group a person belongs to overlap with others that drive emotional decisions. The result is that even right-thinking individuals make unconscious decisions based on a person's race. Brain scans have proved that interactions with people of other ethnic backgrounds set off reactions that may be completely unknown to our conscious selves. The finding may force researchers to think about racism in entirely new ways. It's possible, the researchers say, that even right-thinking, egalitarian people could harbor racist attitudes without knowing. The chemicals involved in perceiving ethnic backgrounds overlap with those for processing emotion and making decisions, according to new research.

The Muslim is believed to have received terrorist training from Al Qaeda's offshoot in Yemen and is ready to strike. Western intelligence officials have long feared such a scenario - a convert to Islam who is trained in terrorist methods and can blend in easily in Europe and the United States, traveling without visa restrictions. European security services, including in Norway, have warned in recent years of homegrown, radicalized Muslims traveling to terror training camps in conflict zones. Many of the known cases involve young men with family roots in Muslim countries. But the latest case involves a man in his 30s with no immigrant background, the officials said. After converting to Islam in 2008, he quickly became radicalized and traveled to Yemen to receive terror training, one of the officials said. The man spent some months in Yemen and is still believed to be there. There are several examples in Europe and the United States of converts to Islam linked to terror plots, from failed shoe-bomber Richard Reid, a British convert, to a Pennsylvania woman dubbed Jihad Jane, who pleaded guilty in 2011 to charges that she plotted to kill a Swedish cartoonist who caricatured the Islamic Prophet Muhammad. In March 2012, Mullah Krekar, a radical Iraqi-born cleric who came to Norway as a refugee, was sentenced to five years in prison for making death threats against Norwegian officials and three Kurdish men he claimed had insulted Islam.

The middle-aged man struck and killed his victims as he was drifting - where drivers make their cars spin and skid at high speed - near the capital Riyadh. He fled the scene before being arrested. Drifting, brought to life on the big screen through the film franchise starring Vin Diesel and Paul Walker, is said to be popular among Saudi men. Saudi Arabia, which follows a strict version of Sunni Islam, does not have a written penal code and judges issue verdicts according to their own interpretation of the Koran. Amnesty International has said that at least 82 people were executed in Saudi Arabia in 201, many of them by public beheading.

Police arrived at a home in Waco, Texas, after a man called 911 to report a man living in his house who was going crazy. African-American Michael Terron Daniel told his housemates that he was on a bad trip after taking the synthetic drug K-2 and began attacking them. Outside the home, Daniel assaulted another man who lived at the home.
When a neighbor tried to intervene, Daniel got down on his hands and knees and began barking and growling like a dog. He then chased the neighbor, who ran into his house. As horrified witnesses watched, Daniel turned his drug-fueled rage to a medium-sized Spaniel mix, who belonged to one of his housemates, beating and choking the animal. Daniel then took a bite out of the dog, ripping pieces of flesh away and eating them.
Police showed up to find Daniel sitting on the front porch with the dog's carcass on his lap. There was blood and fur around his mouth, blood and fur on his clothing. Daniel was arrested at the Waco store where he worked and was charged with cruelty to a non-livestock animal, a felony. His housemates declined to press assault charges against him. He is being held at the McLennan County Jail on $5,000 bond.
Daniel has been in trouble with the Waco Police Department before, but police would not elaborate on any past cases against him. K-2, also known as spice, is a mixture of herbs and spices that is usually sprayed with a compound similar to THC, the psychoactive component of marijuana, according to the DEA. Side effects include paranoia, panic attacks, giddiness and in rare occurrences – violence. Recent zombie-like attacks, like the gruesome face-chewing attack in Miami, are believed to have been caused by ingesting bath salts, a potent hallucinogen.

Judge Patricia Fresard of the Third Circuit Court in Detroit sentenced Dace on one count of carjacking, three counts of kidnapping, three counts of armed robbery and three counts of first-degree criminal sexual conduct and one count of criminal sexual conduct, assault with intent to commit penetration.

Here is an excerpt of an interview that the late Maurice Sendak gave to Gary Groth of The Comics Journal:

SENDAK: Bush was president, I thought, “Be brave. Tie a bomb to your shirt. Insist on going to the White House. And I wanna have a big hug with the vice president, definitely. And his wife, and the president, and his wife, and anybody else that can fit into the love hug.”

GROTH: A group hug.

SENDAK: And then we’ll blow ourselves up, and I’d be a hero. [Groth laughs.] To hell with the kiddie books. He killed Bush. He killed the vice president. Oh my God.

GROTH: I would have been willing to forgo this interview. [Sendak laughs.]

SENDAK: You would have forgotten about it. It would have been a very brave and wonderful thing. But I didn’t do it; I didn’t do it.

Let us hope that if there is a hell then this scumbag is rotting in it!

Monday, June 25, 2012

Brinkin, a community icon who led the fight for San Francisco to recognize same-sex partnerships, has been arrested and booked into San Francisco County Jail, police said. He posted bail and has been released. Brinkin retired from the Human Rights Commission in 2010, and has been a beloved member of the gay community, with the Board of Supervisors even declaring the first week of February as "Larry Brinkin Week."

Antonio Cardenas, 33, has been sentenced to 35 years in prison, and will be on supervised probation for the rest of his life, for repeatedly molesting a Utah boy, now 15, and filming the appalling acts. The sexual abuse began when the boy, who suffers from a learning disability, was encouraged to enroll in a mentoring program in 2004, after he was teased by his classmates. But Cardenas, who was appointed the seven-year-old’s mentor, instead molested and raped him. He continued to do so until 2009, which is when he fled to Mexico after images of him abusing the boy began circulating online. Cardenas had filmed the acts and passed them on to a friend who posted them on to the Internet, where they quickly became among the most popularly traded child pornography in the world. But the pedophile's apprehension was not easy. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children had seen the shocking footage in June 2009 and passed it on FBI special agent Jeff Ross, who was tasked with identifying the Hispanic man and young boy in the distressing film. But despite sending pictures of the boy to schools in Utah, reviewing Hispanics listed in the state’s sex offender database and canvassing hotels in the Las Vegas where some of the abuse had taken place, the agent was no closer to determining the identities of the two. But a breakthrough came in October 2009 after FBI agents in Los Angeles investigating a ring of pedophiles who traded images of child pornography were led to a Missouri man who had posted images of the Utah boy in question being abused. The man gave agents the victim’s name, and Cardenas’, whom he said had moved to Mexico. Utah authorities told Ross that the child had in fact tried to reach out about the abuse before, telling a school official in 2008 that Cardenas had forced him to watch dirty movies, but later retracting his statement. But when he was interviewed by Ross, the boy recounted the years of horrific abuse he had suffered at the hands of the man who was supposed to be his role model. His outraged mother told how the family had trusted Cardenas, letting him attend a family holiday and even take the boy on a trip to Las Vegas. He had also stayed in touch with the boy after returning to Mexico with weekly phone calls and emails. Ross had to find out a way of bringing Cardenas back to the United States and the boy’s mother had a plan. She said that she would pretend the family were throwing a surprise party for the boy, whose birthday is in early January, and invite Cardenas along. It was a difficult plan for the mother, as she was forced to talk to the man who had repeatedly abused her son as if nothing had happened, in the hopes that he would attend the party. Cardenas was arrested on the day of the surprise party in January 2010. Two months later, the agent was working with Interpol in Lyon, France, on child pornography cases when he came across footage of three boys being abused my a Hispanic man while they slept. Until then, Cardenas' family had refused to believe the allegations against him, but when they were shown the new footage to see if they recognised any of the children, they revealed it was Cardenas' own nephews. In February 2012, Cardenas admitted to travelling from Utah to Las Vegas to engage in a sexual act with a child under the age of 12, between June 2005 and July 2006. He also admitted to engaging in sexual acts with the child in Utah before and after the trip to Las Vegas. As part of his plea agreement, prosecutors dropped other counts of aggravated sexual abuse, production of child pornography and distribution of child pornography and agreed to recommend he spend 30 years, rather than life, in prison. But U.S. District Judge Clark Waddoups said that given the age of the victim, and the abuse of his family's trust, he would have to add another five years.

A Cambridge academic, Martin Sewell, a supervisor in the university's Faculty of Economics, points out that black people have a lower average intelligence than whites and says that racism is natural. He also says that feminism harms women and that perhaps it is time to reconsider eugenics. He explains that the most likely reason for the high incidence of black crime is blacks’ lower average intelligence and greater impulsiveness, which themselves are probably biological in origin. A former student at Bristol University and Birkbeck College in London, Sewell has degrees in computing science and mathematics.

Emmanuel De La Rosa, 27, has been charged after he instructed four of his students, including Fernando Salgado, 18, at AB Miller High School to assault at least three of their classmates. De La Rosa facilitated some students to carry out the hazing to curb behavioral problems in the classroom. De La Rosa has been charged with child endangerment. He was released after he posted $100,000 bail. Salgado faces charges of assault, child cruelty and attempted sodomy. He remains on jail, also on a $100,000 bond.

But more than violence between thugs, violence against women has reached horrific proportions. So far in 2012, 60 women have been killed and 100 have been reported missing in the past two years. The murders hit their high in 2010, when 304 women were found dead. The girls may be targeted for organ theft or perhaps, the killers arrived after being deported from the United States.

Sunday, June 24, 2012

David Mendez, 21, and Edras Ramirez, 27, both of Los Angeles, have been booked on suspicion of assault with a deadly weapon. Mendez and Ramirez went to a CHP office and were interviewed and arrested. Investigators have not decided whether charges are warranted against their victim, identified as 50-year-old Jerry Patterson, who has not been arrested. A smartphone video of the confrontation was posted on the website LiveLeak, and received more than 130,000 hits within hours. The video depicts Patterson arguing with three men outside their cars on the side of the freeway. Patterson and one of the three men square off and exchange blows, but then a second man jumps Patterson and helps take him to the ground. Patterson said that he was trying to drive away from his assailants but they chased him down and blocked his vehicle. On the video, shortly after he was knocked to the ground, Patterson appeared to fall unconscious. The two Hispanic suspects then repeatedly kicked him in the head as he lay on the pavement with his arms at his sides.
The three men then got into an older model Volkswagen Jetta and fled the scene. The video showed the Volkswagen's license plate number as 3UGW962, and authorities sought public help to find the suspects. Apparently in response to the publicity, Mendez and Ramirez went to the CHP office to talk with investigators, who arrested them.

Obama leads Romney 66% to 25% among more than 1,000 Latino registered voters surveyed April 16 to May 31, 2012 matching his muscular showing in the 2008 election among Hispanics. Romney is in the weakest position among Latinos of any presidential contender since 1996 — and in those intervening 16 years their percentage of the electorate has doubled. Since the poll was taken, Obama has fortified Hispanic enthusiasm by announcing he would block the deportation of an estimated 800,000 illegal immigrant young Latinos who came to the United States as children. In a subsequent USA TODAY/Gallup survey, more than eight in 10 Latinos approved of Obama's action, most of them strongly. Romney should forget about the Hispanic vote and concentrate on maximizing his share of the white vote.

The bodies discovered in the market's parking lot were a threatening message aimed at a drug cartel. The body parts belonged to 10 men and four women. It appears that it was a message directed at the Gulf cartel.

Retired 88-year-old Tek Young Lin, a Buddhist, of Santa Cruz, California, insisted that he did not coerce any students into having sexual relations. Back then, Lin said that sexual boundaries were not as clearly defined as they are now, in the age of nearly daily revelations involving teachers, priests, rabbis and other figures of authority molesting minors. This latest revelation comes just weeks after the New York Times Magazine published an explosive article that brought to light allegations of sexual abuse involving at least three now-deceased teachers and coaches at the elite school between 1978 and 1994. Since the publication of the expose, some Horace Mann graduates have come forward with accusations against former teachers who are still alive, including Lin, who was also a cross-country coach at the school. Lin retired in 1986 and is unlikely to face legal action or lawsuits because of New York’s statutes of limitation. One student, who said that he was 14 or 15 years old when the inappropriate contact began, said that Lin had sex with him several times in the course of several months, and that they had had a relationship that lasted years. Lin, whose website says he was born in the East Indies, came to the United States as a teenager in 1941.

Mexican officials had paraded before the media a man they said was Jesus Alfredo Guzman, whose father leads the powerful Sinaloa cartel. But the arrested man was in fact Felix Beltran Leon, a car salesman, the attorney general's office said. The authorities had hailed the arrest as the most important in years. Known as El Chapo" or "Shorty", Joaquin Guzman has been in hiding ever since he escaped from prison in 2001. The Sinaloa cartel controls much of the flow of cocaine, marijuana and methamphetamine to the United States. Within hours of the high-profile arrest, doubts had started to be cast on the official version of events. A lawyer proclaiming to speak for the Guzman family released a statement denying that the suspect in custody was the drug boss's son. Beltran Leon's mother then spoke to journalists and denied any link to Joaquin Guzman or the Sinaloa cartel. It took another few hours, while identity tests were carried out, before the government admitted that it had made a huge mistake. In less than a day, the episode has transformed from an apparent coup against one of Mexico's biggest drug cartels to a major embarrassment for President Felipe Calderon's administration. If nothing else, the debacle goes to underscore how murky and confused the world of drug cartel arrests and government intelligence has become in Mexico. With few recent photos of the main players in the drug world available, there may be more such cases of mistaken identity to come for the Mexican armed forces.

Identified only as "LP," the girl told police that she was rarely allowed to leave the closet and often went days without being fed. LP's African-American mother, Jacole Prince, has been arrested and charged with assault, child abuse, and endangering a child’s welfare.

And the overwhelming majority of those black people are killed by other black people. Few "civil rights" leaders have raised their voices to speak out against the tragedy of daily carnage that is black-on-black crime in America. Black teenagers today are afraid of other black teenagers, not whites.

Iafeta Talatonu, 51, has pleaded guilty to defensive homicide after repeatedly stabbing his friend Amuia Taoai in the chest and head in January 2011. The men had been drinking with others at Talatonu's home in Shepparton, in Victoria's northeast, when Taoai made a comment about Talatonu's illegal status in Australia. During the argument that ensued, Taoai began smashing beer bottles on the back of Talatonu's car and threatened him with a broken bottle before punching him in the face three times. Minutes later, Talatonu grabbed a knife and stabbed his 33-year-old friend to death. In sentencing Talatonu in the Victorian Supreme Court, Justice Terry Forrest said that his guilty plea to defensive homicide was accepted on the basis that he had a "genuine, if unreasonable, belief" that he was acting in self-defence. The judge said that Talatonu came to Australia on a visitors visa in 2006 but decided to stay in the country illegally, working as a fruit picker. He developed anxiety over his illegal status and was sensitive to others referring to it, said Justice Forrest. "Those who are inclined to use knives to settle alcohol-fuelled disputes must understand that the community simply will not tolerate this," said Justice Forrest. "A young man has needlessly died at your hand." Talatonu was sentenced to eight years in jail with a non-parole period of five years and three months. He will be deported upon release.

Vazquez-Gonzalez has been sentenced to 521 months in prison, five years of supervised release, and to pay fines and special assessments totaling $1,560. Vazquez-Gonzalez must also forfeit $9 million to the U.S. government. Following Vazquez-Gonzalez's release from prison, he will be deported. Vazquez-Gonzalez pleaded guilty in December 2011 to engaging in a continuing criminal conspiracy, conspiracy to distribute and posses with the intent to distribute cocaine, illegal entry into the country without inspection, conspiracy to launder monetary instruments, and interstate travel in support of racketeering. The court found that Vazquez-Gonzalez was the leader of a drug trafficking organization of at least 28 people and distributed more than 150 kilograms of cocaine while possessing a firearm and making threats related to his drug trafficking enterprise.

According to the NCAA, Hispanics make up just 4% of female college athletes. African-Americans are 11% of female college athletes, but less than 5% for most sports other than track and basketball. These lower participation levels are reflected in their health statistics as well. Only 25% of Hispanics and 22% of African-American girls in high school meet recommended levels of physical activity, compared with 31% of Caucasian girls and 46% of boys.

Juan DelValle, a 65-year-old Hispanic grandfather due to retire at the end of the 2011-2012 school year has been taken off life support in New York's St Barnabas Hospital after punched twice in the face on June 11, 2012. He never regained consciousness. Enraged by DelValle's unsuccessful pass of his illegally parked Chrysler Sebring, African-American Joey Scott, 30, confronted him behind the bus. The bus driver wanted to call police but the black male punched him first instead. The attack caught on CC-TV shows the two standing behind the school bus right before DelValle is sharply knocked to the ground. The black attacker next turns his back from the Latino laying sprawled and lifeless in the street, coolly walking away. Two middle school students were on that bus during the incident. Scott was arrested at his apartment later that day after a reported two-hour negotiation. Scott, who had a previously long rap sheet, is being held on a $250,000 cash bond. The black male faces charges that could potentially be upgraded to murder.

An unnamed customer at Del Taco complained about his order to 28-year-old Gabriel Villalba, who worked at the chain in Hemet, according to a Riverside County sheriff's statement. The confrontation escalated until Villalba stabbed the customer in the abdomen with a knife, the police report states. The customer was driven to the hospital by friends. Villalba was arrested on suspicion of assault with a deadly weapon and is being held on $25,000 bail.

The Study of Rabbinic Compensation by Gender collected gender and biennial salary data of CCAR rabbis and congregations that are members of the Union for Reform Judaism and represent the majority of CCAR rabbis who are serving URJ congregations on a full-time basis. “While we have always done salary surveys about the Reform rabbinate, we have now collected hard data and information that allows for greater analysis,” Rabbi Jonathan Stein, CCAR's president, said in a statement. Solo or senior rabbis, as well as assistant female rabbis, earn less than their male counterparts on average. For example, newly ordained female senior or solo rabbis serving a congregation of 300 family units earn $97,746, as opposed to male rabbis who make $102,934. And female senior or solo rabbis with five to eight years of experience serving congregations of 600 or more family units make $180,870, while male rabbis earn $217,079. For associate rabbis, however, the base salaries of female rabbis are slightly higher than for the men. According to the CCAR, nearly 600 women have become Reform rabbis since 1972 and there are a total of 2,000 Reform rabbis in North America. “The results were troubling but not surprising; it quantified that which we knew anecdotally,” said Rabbi Steven Fox, chief executive of the CCAR, in a statement. “A salary gap in 2012 is unacceptable.” Fox said the results of the study present an important opportunity and tool for Reform rabbis, congregations and organizations. “As the rabbinic voice of the Reform movement, we must take the lead on this issue,” Fox said. “When we see data confirming that few women are serving large congregations on a full-time basis, we need to ask why and what we can do about that.”

Andrew Goodman pleaded guilty to 48 felonies - including criminal sex acts with a minor, sex abuse and sexual misconduct - after Justice Martin Murphy dangled a 2-year sentence in front of him. Assistant District Attorney Kevin O'Donnell said that prosecutors would have pursued a penalty that could have locked up Goodman for "dozens, if not hundreds of years." Goodman, who was arrested in June 2010 for preying on the boys over several years, was thrilled with the offer. "It's an amazing deal," said Israel Fried, a defense lawyer for Goodman. "He's very happy to put this behind him, do his time and hopefully get on with his life." Community members had filmed Goodman sneaking 11 underage boys in and out of his 15th Street home during pre-dawn hours, and trashed him as a "lifelong molestor who preys on young boys" in letters written to the judge. Fried said that prosecutors "weren't going to offer anything," charging that they weren't going to go easy on Goodman because of the heavy criticism District Attorney Charles Hynes has taken for his handling of sex-abuse cases in Brooklyn's Orthodox Jewish community. "These are the crimes de jour, so to speak and they're the ones that have put the District Attorney under the microscope," Fried said. "That's why they've taken such a hard line." But Hynes fired back that prosecutors should "have the right to appeal a disposition taken over their objections. Here, an acting State Supreme Court Justice promised a sentence of two years to someone who pled guilty to 48 felonies," he said in a statement.

The district attorney, Charles J. Hynes, says that the men were part of an effort to protect a prominent member of the Satmar Hasidic community, Nechemya Weberman, who has been accused of 88 counts of sexual misconduct, including oral sex with a child younger than 13 years old. The charges all involve one girl, now 17, who was referred by her school to get counseling by Weberman, and then said that she was abused by him during therapy sessions. The charges are the first time in at least two decades that Hynes has charged Hasidic Jews with intimidation of a witness in a sexual abuse case, even though victims, their advocates and prosecutors say that intimidation has long been a major obstacle to prosecution of abuse among ultra-Orthodox Jews. Recently, Hynes has been saying that the intimidation of witnesses in the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community is worse than in the world of organized crime. Prosecutors charged Abraham Rubin, 48, of Williamsburg with bribery, witness tampering and coercion. They said that he had been recorded offering the accuser’s boyfriend money, and he suggested that the young couple could flee to Israel to avoid testifying. He also offered to provide them with a lawyer who could help them avoid cooperating with prosecutors. Prosecutors also charged three brothers, Jacob, Joseph and Hertzka Berger, with coercion, saying that they threatened and then removed the kosher certification of a restaurant run by the accuser’s boyfriend. The brothers are sons of a local rabbi who issues kosher certifications to stores. The four men have pleaded not guilty in a Brooklyn courtroom packed with benches full of their supporters, dressed in the dark clothing worn by Hasidic men. A prosecutor, Josh Hanshaft, said that the men had been “telling witnesses to forget what they know, not to come to court, to disappear,” and said prosecutors had “clear, substantial evidence” that part of the plan to silence witnesses involved offering money to dissuade their testimony. If convicted, Rubin faces up to seven years in prison. Joseph and Hertzka Berger each face a year in jail, and Jacob Berger faces up to four years. The intimidation charges, a moment of triumph for Hynes, come as his office has been criticized by victims, victims’ advocates, former Mayor Ed Koch and others for an insufficiently aggressive response to the sexual abuse of minors within the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community. Now, Hynes’s office is suffering an embarrassing reversal in another abuse case involving an Orthodox Jewish accuser. After revelations that Hynes’s office had failed to share exculpatory evidence with defense attorneys, lawyers said that all charges against four black men accused of raping and forcibly prostituting a Chabad Lubavitch woman from Crown Heights for nearly a decade would be dropped. In the Williamsburg case, the accuser was in sixth grade when she was referred to Weberman, an unlicensed therapist, by her Williamsburg religious school. Her parents were told that she would be expelled from school unless they paid $150 an hour for him to provide her with therapy. Instead, Weberman, who is now 53, repeatedly sexually molested her over three years, when she was 12 to 15, and told her that she would be expelled from school if she told anyone. The girl then changed schools and told a licensed therapist what had happened. The therapist reported the girl’s allegations to the police. After Weberman’s arrest in 2011, a campaign of intimidation began against the accuser, her boyfriend and her family members. Prominent Hasidic Jews publicly proclaimed their support for Weberman, and, on May 16, 2012 hosted hundreds of Hasidic men at a local wedding hall to raise money for Weberman’s legal defense. To promote the fund-raiser, his supporters hung posters on lampposts and brick walls around the neighborhood, accusing the young woman, in Yiddish, of libel. The girl’s boyfriend, 24-year-old Hershy Deutsch, organized a demonstration outside the fund-raiser. In an interview at the time, he said that he had faced intimidation because of his girlfriend’s allegations, and that he had decided to speak out. He said that a restaurant he manages in Williamsburg, the Old Williamsburg Cafe on Lee Avenue, was targeted by a flood of false complaints to city authorities. Men from the neighborhood had offered him $500,000 if he could persuade the girl to drop her case. Victims’ advocates said that they were glad that Hynes had brought an intimidation case, and hoped it would begin to ease the problem. While some ultra-Orthodox rabbis now say that a child molester should be reported to the police, others strictly adhere to an ancient Jewish prohibition against mesirah, the turning in of a Jew to non-Jewish authorities, and instruct victims to either remain silent or let rabbinical authorities quietly handle the allegations. “This is a big threshold,” said Mark Appel, the founder of Voice of Justice, a nonprofit agency that helps ultra-Orthodox victims. And Joel Engelman, the founder of the Jewish Survivors Network, also praised Hynes for bringing the intimidation case, because, he said, “in the Williamsburg Hasidic community, intimidation is rampant.”

A heavily armed team of NYPD officers and US Marshals grabbed 30-year-old Roberto Nunez as he was walking into the Bronx home of his brother near Yankee Stadium. Nunez is a convicted felon who has served time for robbery and other crimes. He had been staying at different homes since the June 7, 2012 shooting and was taken in by a friend of a friend who noticed that he was hiding a gun. The acquaintance then sold the .38-caliber revolver to an undercover officer. The NYPD had it tested and discovered that it matched the shell casings found in the victims. The three victims - Luis Catalan, 25; Heriberto Suazo, 26; and Amaury Rodriguez, 30 — were found slumped in the 2009 BMW on West 122nd Streer near Claremont Avenue outside the Manhattan School of Music and across from Columbia University’s Knox Hall. All three victims were Manhattan residents who were marijuana traffickers with extensive criminal records, and police believe that they may have been killed in retaliation for robbing rival drug dealers. Surveillance video captured a man believed to be the suspect calmly walking from the scene after discarding the shirt he had worn during the shooting. Police said that DNA from the shirt helped link the suspect to the crime.

People with a higher proportion of African ancestry experienced a larger decrease in lung function as measured by forced expiratory volume in one second per pack and per year of smoking. Tobacco related disease is a primary source of mortality for African American men.

Breast cancer is the most common cancer among American women, claiming the lives of 40,500 in 200. Of those, triple negative breast cancer strikes white women 15%of the time but 30% of African-American women. Research has shown that triple negative breast cancers are even more common in western sub-Saharan African women compared to the proportion of American women where these triple negative breast cancers are seen. They account for about three times the proportion of breast cancers in African women, compared to what is seen in America — hinting that a genetic inheritance might be part of the reason African-American women are disproportionately impacted.

Monozygotic (identical) twins raised apart are more similar in IQ (74%) than dizygotic (fraternal) twins raised together (60%) and much more than parent-children pairs (42%); half-siblings (31%); adoptive siblings (29%-34%); virtual twins, or similarly aged but unrelated children raised together (28%); adoptive parent-child pairs (19%) and cousins (15%). Nothing but genes can explain this hierarchy.

The boy and his dad got the order of protection in 2008 after accusing the ultra-Orthodox rabbi of being a child molester. The 66-year-old rabbi faces up to a year behind bars if he is convicted of violating the five-year order of protection.

Monica Knight, 17, veered across the road to collide with the bus in March 2012, hospitalizing her three passengers, one of whom remains in a coma while another suffered a brain injury. Police found marijuana residue and eight prescription pills strewn throughout Knight's red BMW after it hit the bus - which had just dropped of students at a high school - in Kingston, Massachusetts. She also tested positive for cocaine after her court appearance. Knight faces charges of reckless operation of a motor vehicle, a marked lanes violation, failure to wear a seat belt and possession of a Class B substance. She had only had her license for four months, but was not supposed to have passengers, apart from family members, for the first six months.

Friday, June 22, 2012

At one lunch, guests heard an unusual announcement that they needed to hand over their silverware for security reasons. “It’s very important that you use your utensils as soon as possible,” National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials board member Raquel Regalado told about 1000 delegates at the group’s annual conference. Regalado hurried the diners to finish up their salads and pre-cut chicken breasts, saying that the Secret Service required that there be no knives at the tables and that the forks be rounded up before Obama entered the room. “As you know, we’re having another speaker and there is some Secret Service involved. So there’s a reason why there’s no knives at your table and the forks will be collected. ... And I’m not joking,” Regalado told the audience in a ballroom at Disney’s Contemporary Resort at Walt Disney World. “So, like the good Hispanic mother I’m here to tell you to please, eat your lunch.” Would this have happened if Obama was appearing before a Jewish group?

Amine El Khalifi, 29, has appeared in U.S. District Court on charges of attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction against property that is owned and used by the United States. Those charges stem from the illegal Moroccan immigrant’s role in a thwarted Islamic suicide bombing attack on the U.S. Capitol on February 17, 2012. El Khalifi’s arrest was the culmination of an extensive investigation by the FBI, which included undercover agents posing as members of al Qaeda. A bearded and tattooed El Khalifi was led into the courtroom in handcuffs and joked with his defense attorneys before entering his guilty plea. During his appearance, his defense attorney Kenneth Troccoli told the court that his client had previously served time in the District in 2007 for two counts of simple assault. U.S. Federal Judge James Cacheris remanded El Khalifi back into custody until his sentencing date of September 14, 2012 pending a pre-sentence report. Under the terms of his plea agreement, El Khalifi will receive a sentence of 25 to 30 years in prison. If convicted, he could have faced a maximum penalty of life in prison. The U.S. Capitol was not El Khalifi’s initial target, but instead one settled upon after he considered targeting first a synagogue, then a crowded District restaurant. El Khalifi was in possession of explosives and a firearm that had been rendered inoperable by law enforcement prior to his arrest outside the Capitol. El Khalifi planned to use the weapon to shoot at U.S. Capitol Police in order to gain entrance to the building.

It has long been assumed that men typically want to have sex more often than women because they have higher levels of testosterone.
But a team from the University of Michigan found that women with high testosterone had a greater desire to masturbate compared to their peers. However, they were surprised to discover that women with higher testosterone levels were less likely to want to have sex with a partner. It suggests that behind the finding is a complex web of factors including anxiety. Researchers recruited 105 men and 91 women who completed questionnaires about their sex lives, answering questions such as "Are you self-conscious of your body during sex?" They also provided a saliva sample which was tested for both testosterone and the stress hormone cortisol. Testosterone is a steroid hormone that is released by the ovaries in women and testes in men as well as in the adrenal gland in both sexes. Researchers found that levels of testosterone had nothing to do with how often men thought about masturbation or sex. However, women with higher testosterone were less likely to want sex with someone. Although it may seem counter-intuitive it fits with previous studies that have found women in long-term relationships have lower testosterone. It could be that the hormone drives them to find a partner to be close to rather than just have sex with. Or it may be that higher testosterone reflects higher stress in women rather than a higher sexual drive. The one link researchers found was between masturbation and sexual desire. Men were more likely to masturbate than women and also reported a greater desire to have sex. It is not yet known whether desire triggers masturbation or vice versa.

For Indian men in the same age group, suicide claimed just slightly fewer lives than transport accidents in 2010. The suicide rate is highest among well-educated young people from India's richer, southern states. Young educated Indians from the richer states of India are killing themselves in numbers that are almost the highest in the world. In the Western world, suicide is more common among older, poorer and lesser educated people. Some 900,000 people around the world kill themselves every year, according to the World Health Organization - about 13 out of every 100,000. Of the global total, nearly 190,000 suicides were believed to have occurred in India in 2010 - second only to China with an estimated 200,000 cases per year. India has a population of about 1.2 billion and China some 1.3 billion - together they account for more than a third of the world population of seven billion. The rate of suicide among women in India was three times higher than in high-income countries, but tapered off among women who were either divorced, widowed or separated from their husbands. This is consistent with other research from India that marriage is also a risk factor for depression, which is of course the commonest mental illness associated with suicide. The most plausible explanation is that for many women marriage is not out of choice and they find themselves trapped in very difficult and stressful social circumstance and of course there is the huge issue of domestic violence. Self-poisoning by pesticide is the method most often used, followed by hanging. Most Indians do not have access to suicide prevention programs or mental health care. Suicide is a crime in India. Globally, suicide is the most common cause of death in female adolescents and the third in young men after road traffic accidents and violence.

The sentence — largely in line with the term sought by prosecutors — came after Jesse Curtis Morton, 33, offered an apology for his conduct, saying he "contributed to a clash of civilizations" by espousing a violent ideology. "I justified atrocities by Muslims simply because they were carried out by the weak against the powerful," said Morton, who founded the now-defunct Revolution Muslim website. He and another defendant, Zachary Chesser, used the website to deliver thinly veiled threats against South Park creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker for depicting Muhammad in a bear costume. Chesser earlier received a 25-year sentence, but he also tried to travel to Somalia to join the al-Shabab Islamic terrorist group.

Obama picks up support from just 35% of white voters overall. That’s eight points below the 43% of the white vote he won in 2008. Among white Democrats, 17% currently plan to vote for Romney. Just 33% now believe that Obama is doing a good or excellent job when it comes to the economy. That’s down from 41% at the beginning of May 2012. Forty-five percent (45%) believe that America’s best days have come and gone. Just 37% believe that they are in the future. Another poll shows that nearly half of the nation’s new voters, age 18-24, think that Obama has done a “fair” or “poor” job as president, resulting in a 13 point drop in support.

Nathaniel Lawrence, 16, is charged with conspiracy to commit armed robbery, bringing to six the number of black suspects who planned the robbery that led to Liu's death. Two of those black suspects, 15-year-old Mustafaa Friend and 20-year-old Cornell Haugabook Jr., face first-degree murder charges for acting as the trigger men. On June 14, 2012 Liu left the China King restaurant headed for an address on South 13th Street. There, Friend and Haugabook, each armed with a handgun, confronted the 60-year-old man, said Assistant District Attorney Jason Smith. Friend shot Liu in the foot and then Haugabook shot him in the face, killing him, Smith said. The two returned to a nearby house and shared the food with the others. After eating, the group, "came back to view the body and go through the car," said Smith. Like Lawrence, Marvin White, 18; Rasheed Thompson, 16; and Manie Johnson-Martin, 16, are black and charged with conspiracy to commit armed robbery in connection to the case.

The cases of HIV have dramatically grown in Washington, DC with rates doubling to 12%, it has been revealed. In a study conducted by DC health officials, the 482 people surveyed with HIV were mostly African-American, more than half had incomes of less than $10,000 and 37% were unemployed. There are nearly 15,000 people over the age of 12 living in DC with HIV or AIDS. That is the highest level - at 2.7% - for any city in the United States. Most cities have large concentrations of HIV cases within groups of men who have sex with men and intravenous drug users. In DC, however, the cases usually involve heterosexual women who are black. Black women make up 90% of all female cases of HIV in the city. It's likely that 20% to 30% may be unaware that they're even infected.

It is not widely known that 4.8 million slaves were brought to Brazil from Africa – a number that dwarfs the number of slaves brought to the United States. Almost half of all slaves brought to the New World were brought to Brazil. More slaves were also brought to Jamaica and Haiti than to the Northern American colonies. There are 75 million people of African descent in Brazil. There are 42 million African-Americans in the United States. Brazil was the last country in the Western hemisphere to abolish slavery. There are over 100 racial categories of blackness in Brazil. Black slaves weren’t treated as harshly in Dixie as in Brazil.

Who believes that life has gotten better over the last decade? Gays and lesbians (55%), the upper class (48%), Hispanics (44%), immigrants (41%), and African-Americans (33%). Who believes that their overall quality of life has declined? Young adults (54%), Whites (38%), seniors (55%), middle class Americans (64%), and working class Americans (70%).

Thursday, June 21, 2012

In the most disturbing incident, a mob of six black teenagers shouting, “Dirty Jew!” and “Dirty kike!” repeatedly bashed Marc Heinberg, 61, as he walked home from temple in Sheepshead Bay on a Friday night.

Shabir Ahmed, 59, of Oldham, was one of nine Pakistani men convicted of sex offenses against children at Liverpool Crown Court in May 2012. He was not named at the time because he faced further charges, but was jailed for 19 years. He has been found guilty at Manchester Crown Court of raping and sexually abusing a girl for more than a decade. Prosecuting, Rachel Smith said Ahmed, of Windsor Road, had treated his victim as a "possession" which he used for his own sexual gratification. She said he had been "a violent and controlling man" who had abused the girl on "an almost weekly basis". "She tried to make him stop, but it was to no avail," she said. The court was told the victim felt a sense of shame about what happened to her, which had stopped her reporting it to the police for many years. Smith said the reality of what he had done "was never far from her thoughts" and that she had described "having dreams about it". Judge Mushtaq Khokhar adjourned sentencing until August 2012 to allow for the preparation of a pre-sentence report. Speaking after the verdict, Det Ch Supt Mary Doyle said Ahmed's victim had "shown phenomenal bravery to come forward and tell the police about what happened to her". "We already knew Ahmed was an integral part of the Rochdale grooming case - now we can also say his horrific campaign of abuse began many years ago with the systematic rape of this one victim," she said. Ahmed was one of the nine men from Rochdale and Oldham who were found guilty of exploiting girls as young as 13 at two takeaway restaurants in the Heywood area of Rochdale. Doyle said that he had been "the ringleader of a loosely connected on-street grooming ring" and had been "the common denominator in a group of men who raped and abused girls aged between 13 and 17 at the time of the offenses". The case sparked protests and vandalism in Heywood and caused national debate about the safety of children in care and whether race was a factor in on-street grooming. Ahmed was found guilty at Liverpool Crown Court of two rapes, aiding and abetting rape, sexual assault and trafficking for the purposes of sexual exploitation. Sentencing him in May 2012, Judge Gerald Clifton said Ahmed was an "unpleasant and hypocritical bully" who had ordered a 15-year-old girl to have sex with one of his fellow gang members as a birthday "treat".

Police and animal rescuers saved 47 pit bulls from the dungeon at 1254 Sherman Ave. and collared their tormentor, Raul Sanchez. One by one the battered pups were carried from the windowless basement, which had been turned into a fighting arena, with room for 100 spectators. The dogs ranged in age from 12 weeks to 5 years. Many were shaking and timid. Some were bone-thin. Others squinted once outside, never before having seen the light of day. All had sad expressions. “It’s pretty horrific inside — horrible conditions. I couldn’t even describe it,” said NYPD Deputy Inspector Anthony Favale. “The dogs appear to be in various stages of abuse and injury.” Sanchez, 57, bred the animals and kept them in crates, stacked one atop another, police said. He trained them to fight and held twisted practice sessions. Police recovered from the basement treadmills designed for use by dogs; harnesses and muzzles; syringes; a shopping cart full of raw chicken parts; a .25-caliber handgun, and a cash stash. Other evidence was heartbreaking: Many of the dogs were scarred, “evidence of previous fighting,” said Howard Lawrence of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. The agency provided specialists to care for the animals. Police are investigating the dog-fighting operation, to see if Sanchez had help, sources said. Sanchez was preliminarily charged with six criminal counts, including one felony rap for training animals to fight, and three more felonies for permitting animal fighting, police said.